A manually operated wooden drawbridge was built in 1916 on Palmetto Park Road, making beach access easier. This view is looking west over the bridge. On the right is the tender’s wife, Mrs. Townsend. Photos courtesy of the Boca Raton Historical Society
By Deborah S. Hartz-Seeley
Sugar sand, palmetto forests and plenty of mosquitoes made life for settlers who lived in Boca Raton about 100 years ago very different from what it is today.
“There weren’t any condos or high-rises, but there was a lot of land for the taking,” Susan Gillis, curator of the Boca Raton Historical Society and Museum, said.
Her information was gleaned from primary sources left behind by the pioneers. These include survey notes, maps, correspondence and photos from Thomas Rickards, who platted the area for Henry Flagler and his FEC Railroad. He ended up staying when he settled on 50 acres near Lake Boca Raton.
Gillis used photos, correspondence and diaries kept from 1903 to 1935 by settler Frank Chesebro. He had 60 acres where he grew mostly tomatoes and pineapples.
They were two of the five or six families and a few bachelors who inhabited the area at the time. But what was life like for them?
Farming was the mainstay of the early settlers who came mostly from northern Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Vermont and upstate New York.
In his diaries, Chesebro, a trained agriculturist from Grand Rapids, Mich., mentioned growing crops recognized today. These include mangoes, oranges, limes, guavas, loquats, watermelons, eggplants and sweet corn. But the settlers also tried their hand at growing rice, cotton and peanuts — not always with success.
And Lake Boca Raton was home to plenty of fish, including flounder and pompano. In fact, there are stories of it being so plentiful the fish would jump into the boats.
Bugs, vermin and snakes were never in short supply. The only way to combat them was with organic pesticides such as whale oil soap or whitewashing oranges and grapefruits to keep the rabbits off them. The smoke from smudge pots was the only hope to keep the mosquitoes away, as DDT had not yet been invented.
However, indoor plumbing came to the area in the 1920s; Chesebro had an indoor toilet by 1926. But electricity, which was available in Fort Lauderdale, hadn’t come as far north as Boca Raton. So children who attended the one-room wooden school built in 1908 had to do their homework by kerosene lamp.
If, like Chesebro, you were lucky enough to own an automobile, you might don your wool knit bathing suit, pile into the car and head to the beach. If others were walking along the sand road, it would be neighborly to stop and give them a ride across the wooden bridge built at Palmetto Park Road in 1916.
But once you got to the barrier island, you probably had to make your way through a jungle of sea grapes, strangler figs, pine trees and coconut palms to the sandy beach. From here you could swim along the rocky reef looking for colorful fish.
But you had to keep your eye out for shipwrecked timber. Early settlers salvaged it to build their homes.
“Even so, we weren’t no hick town,” Gillis said.
In 1915, locals welcome the new Dixie Highway that has just opened through Palm Beach County.
The Yamato Colony (pronounced YAH-ma-to) was for the most part made up of 15 second sons from Japanese families who wouldn’t inherit land in their own country. They bought 40 acres in Boca Raton, married and set up this farming community. There were never more than 50 settlers including these children of the Kamiya family, who sit on their front porch in 1914.
About this series
From its pre-Columbian inhabitants to the “city with an attitude” it has become, Boca Raton’s history is rich and compelling. Much of it was revealed during a four-part series, Boca History 101, last month at FAU under the auspices of the Lifelong Learning Society.
\Susan Gillis, curator of the Boca Raton Historical Society and Museum, and historic preservationist Bonnie Dearborn were the instructors.
Coastal Star reporter Deborah S. Hartz-Seeley attended each session and shares her observations. Her reports on the first two classes — about how a farming town became a vacationers mecca and the hardships of early settlers — appear in this edition. The final two installments — about architecture and life during World War II — will appear in the December issue.
Right: Susan Gillis
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